In my essay “Rejecting Spiritualism,” I complained about the relativism (and corresponding meaninglessness) that plagues the language of spirituality. In reply, someone referred me to the following statement by Swami Vivekananda: “I pray for the day to come when there are as many types of religions as the number of people in the world.”

Leave it to the ever-quotable Swami V to come up with a comment favoring religious propagation that I could get behind.

The Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious festival, has just rounded its halfway point in Parag, near Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. Occurring roughly every three years, the Mela coincides with certain astrological events, and lasts approximately eight weeks. This year’s festivities, will be attended by an estimated eight million people, including the traditional quorum of spiritual poseurs, religious exhibitionists, and voyeurs. Only the most uncritically relativistic, everything-is-beautiful-in-its-own-way, intellectually blinkered observers could possibly see the Kumbh Mela as anything other than a spiritual freak show, notwithstanding the devout piety of the rank-and-file superstitious who also attend.

The rather poor 2005 film, Kumbh Mela, depicted a small slice of the brainlessness of the event. My evidence for the spiritual vacuity of the Kumbh Mela and its participants, however, is drawn from today’s Times of India headline, “Heaps of Garbage Lie Unattended in Mela Area.”

I’m posting this from the tarmac of the airport in Delhi (I no more enjoy calling it “Indira Gandhi International Airport” than I would willingly refer to National Airport in Washington, D.C. “Ronald Reagan Airport”), on my way to the 7th Annual International AIDS Conference. India is playing host to this year’s gathering of leading scientists, doctors, and NGOs working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the venue for the conference is Varanasi.

I am looking forward to the conference, at which I will be representing an innovative biotechnology project that provides unique sample preservation tools to enable the diagnosing HIV infection through analysis of DNA. Still, I am dreading being back in Varanasi. Rather than recount my reasons, let me attach the text of an email I sent following my previous visit in 2002.Continue reading ‘Varanasi: Shit-Hole of the Gods’

We awoke this morning in the blackness just short of dawn, to the sound of firecrackers, temple bells, and chanting. Today marks the second day of Pongal, the four-day harvest festival which, after Diwali, is the biggest holdiay in Tamil Nadu. Social celebrations typically commence on the second morning, called Surya Pongal, with prayers offered to Surya, the Sun God.

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